Where Are The Cyborgs in Cybernetics Kline

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2009 39: 331 Social Studies of Science
Ronald Kline
Where are the Cyborgs in Cybernetics?
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ABSTRACT Cyborgs cybernetic organisms, hybrids of humans and machines have
pervaded everyday life, the military, popular culture, and the academic world since the
advent of cyborg studies in the mid 1980s. They have been a recurrent theme in STS in
recent decades, but there are surprisingly few cyborgs referred to in the early history
of cybernetics in the USA and Britain. In this paper, I analyze the work of the early
cyberneticians who researched and built cyborgs. I then use that history of cyborgs as a
basis for reinterpreting the history of cybernetics by critiquing cyborg studies that give
a teleological account of cybernetics, and histories of cybernetics that view it as a
unitary discipline. I argue that cyborgs were a minor research area in cybernetics,
usually classified under the heading of medical cybernetics, in the USA and Britain
from the publication of Wieners Cybernetics in 1948 to the decline of cybernetics
among mainstream scientists in the 1960s. During that period, cyberneticians held
multiple interpretations of their field. Most of the research on cybernetics focused on
the analogy between humans and machines the main research method of cybernetics
not the fusion of humans and machines, the domain of cyborgs. Although many
cyberneticians in the USA and Britain viewed cybernetics as a universal discipline, they
created contested, area-specific interpretations of their field under the metadiscourse
of cybernetics.
Keywords bionics, cold war, cybernetics, cyborgs, Norbert Wiener, scientific
discourse
Where are the Cyborgs in Cybernetics?
Ronald Kline
Cyborgs cybernetic organisms, hybrids of humans and machines are all
around us, pervading everyday life, the military, popular culture, and, since
the advent of cyborg studies in the mid 1980s, academic literature (Haraway,
1985, 1997, 2000; Gray et al., 1995). Yet, when researching the history of
cybernetics, I was surprised to find few cyborgs in a material or a metaphor-
ical sense in the scientific discipline that gave them their name. Cyborgs are
largely absent in the writings of Norbert Wiener, the MIT mathematician
who did much to establish the field of cybernetics in the late 1940s and
early 1950s, in the discussions at the cybernetics conferences sponsored by
the Josiah Macy Jr Foundation from 1946 to 1953, and in the research of
physical and social scientists in the USA and Britain who worked in cyber-
netics from about 1945 to 1970.
The genealogy of the word cyborg is well known (Gray et al., 1995).
In 1960, during the height of the Cold War space race, Manfred Clynes,
Social Studies of Science 39/3 (June 2009) 331362
SSS and SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
ISSN 0306-3127 DOI: 10.1177/0306312708101046
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chief research scientist at the Rockland State psychiatric hospital in New
York, introduced the term in a paper presented at a military conference on
space medicine that he co-authored with Nathan S. Kline, director of
research at Rockland and a specialist in therapeutic drugs. For the artifi-
cially extended homeostatic control system functioning unconsciously, one
of us (Manfred Clynes) has coined the term Cyborg. The Cyborg deliber-
ately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulatory
control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments
(Kline & Clynes, 1961: 34748).
1
Clynes and Kline created the cyborg
technique as a means to alter the bodies of astronauts so they could survive
the harsh environment of outer space, an alternative to providing an earth-
like environment for space travel.
Clynes and Kline introduced the term as an abbreviation for cyber-
netic organism. They used cybernetic in the sense defined by Wiener, as
an adjective denoting the entire field of control and communication the-
ory, whether in the machine or in the animal (Wiener, 1948: 19). At first
thought, cybernetic organism seems like a misnomer because all organ-
isms are cybernetic in that they interact with the world through informa-
tion and feedback control, the key concepts in cybernetics.
2
The usage by
Clynes and Kline becomes clearer when we consider the laboratory mouse
that they implanted with an osmotic pump (Fig. 1). Drugs are injected into
the mouse at a biological rate controlled by feedback. The researcher mon-
itors and sets the rate of the pump (Kline & Clynes, 1961). The mouse and
implanted pump is thus a cybernetically extended organism an organism
extended by means of cybernetic technology what they called a cyborg.
In the first part of the essay, I use the terms cyborg and cybernetics
in this general manner, while also acknowledging metaphorical uses of the
terms, to answer the question: Where are the cyborgs in cybernetics? I focus
332 Social Studies of Science 39/3
FIGURE 1
Cyborg Mouse with Implanted Osmotic Pump, from Clynes and Kline (1960: 27)
on the work of early cyberneticians who researched and built cyborgs to
explain why cyborgs had a relatively minor place in the early years of cyber-
netics. In the second part of the essay, I employ that analysis of the cyborg
to lay a basis for reinterpreting the history of cybernetics in the USA and
Britain. I critique cyborg studies that give a teleological account of cyber-
netics, and histories of cybernetics that view it as a unitary discipline.
Several studies have reduced the complex history of cybernetics to the
science of cyborgs by reading the early years of cybernetics through the lens
of cyborg studies, ironically something that Haraway does not do herself.
3
We see this tendency in the review of cyborgology by Gray et al. (1995);
in Edwards (1996), who interprets cybernetics and information theory as
the basis for a cyborg discourse that supported the closed-world dis-
course of the computerized Cold War in the USA; in Hayles (1999), espe-
cially in her account of the first-wave of cybernetics; and in the International
Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Smelser & Baltes, 2001).
4
The second edition of this classic reference work, published in 1968, has
an entry on cybernetics that recounts the wide variety of research per-
formed under that flexible and contested rubric (Maron, 1968). The third
edition of the encyclopedia, published in 2001, replaced the entry on
cybernetics with one on cyborgs. It describes how the cyborg grew out of
Cold War research in cybernetics, the proliferation of cyborgs in science
fiction and fact, and how scholars have followed Haraway to embrace the
cyborg as an ironic myth for political action (Law & Moser, 2001).
In contrast, Galisons history of the origins of cybernetics in Wieners
wartime research on an anti-aircraft system (Galison, 1994) criticizes
Haraway for her attempt to base a postmodern methodology on the cyborg
metaphor, for thinking that a cybernetic creature could shed its patriarchal
military origins. But his argument that a cybernetic vision of the world,
based on the ontology of the enemy pilot, extends from World War II to the
present, flattens the history of cybernetics. It reduces its many interpretations
to a single, decontextualized Manichean vision that replicates itself expan-
sively during the turbulent course of the Cold War. Kay (2000: chap. 3) and
Bowker (1993; 2005: chap. 2) also ignore multiple interpretations of cyber-
netics and analyze it as a uniform discourse.
5
Kay treats cybernetics as the
vehicle to create and popularize an information discourse in post-war
molecular biology, and Bowker treats it as a universal discipline or meta-
science that claimed to subsume all sciences. Despite their differing method-
ologies, all of these authors describe a uniform, successful, and (for Bowker)
a rather atemporal scientific discourse.
6
I argue, instead, that cyborgs were a minor research area in cybernet-
ics, usually classified under the heading of medical cybernetics, in the
USA and Britain from the publication of Wieners Cybernetics in 1948, to
the decline of cybernetics among mainstream scientists in the 1960s, and
that cyberneticians held multiple interpretations of their field. Most of the
research on cybernetics focused on the analogy between humans and
machines the main research method of cybernetics not the fusion of
humans and machines the domain of cyborgs. Most researchers created
Kline: Where are the Cyborgs in Cybernetics? 333
models of human behavior, rather than enhancing human capabilities
through cyborg engineering. Although many cyberneticians in the USA
and Britain viewed cybernetics as a universal discipline, they created con-
tested, area-specific interpretations of their field under the metadiscourse
of cybernetics.
Creating Cyborgs from Cybernetics: A Critique of Hayles
Katherine Hayless influential book, How We Became Posthuman, provides one
answer to my question (Where are the cyborgs in cybernetics?) by explaining
how cyborgs grew out of cybernetics. Three interrelated themes run through
the book: how information lost its body, how the cyborg was created as a tech-
nological artifact and cultural icon after World War II, and how a historically
specific construction called the human is giving way to a different construction
called the posthuman (Hayles, 1999: 2, her emphasis). By posthuman, Hayles
refers to the loss of human subjectivity characteristic of the Enlightenment,
not a reconstruction of the body through cyborg engineering.
The construction of the cyborg is tied to her history of cybernetics,
which she represents by three overlapping waves: homeostasis (ca. 1945 to
1960); self-organization (ca. 19601985); and virtuality (ca. 1985 to the
present). Cybernetics was formulated as a discipline in the first wave,
reformulated as the radical epistemology second-order cybernetics in the
second wave, and is now central to contemporary debates swirling around
an emerging discipline known as artificial life (Hayles, 1999: 6, 16). The
anthropological concept of the skeuomorph old design elements existing
in new designs explains the morphing from one wave to the next. Hayles
admits that her book is not meant to be a history of cybernetics. It leaves
out important figures in order to show the complex interplays between embod-
ied forms of subjectivity and arguments for disembodiment throughout the cyber-
netic tradition (Hayles, 1999: 6, 7, her emphasis). The skeuomorphs thus
mark one trajectory of development in the history of cybernetics.
How are cyborgs created? Although Hayles distinguishes between
cyborgs in the technical sense (for example, a human with a pacemaker)
and metaphoric cyborgs (for example, a human playing video games), she
follows Haraway in viewing the cyborg as both technological object and
discursive formation (Hayles, 1999: 115). Hayles argues that Wieners
book, Cybernetics, illustrates how discourse collaborates with technology to
create cyborgs. For example, a cybernetician proposes an electronic or
mathematical model to analyze a physiological tremor. Sometimes the
model is used to construct a cybernetic mechanism that can be tested
experimentally. The researcher claims discursively that the unknown
human mechanism is similar to this homeostatic model. Then,
cybernetics can be used not only to correct dysfunctions but also to
improve normal functioning. As a result, the cyborg signifies something
more than a retrofitted human. It points toward an improved hybrid
species that has the capacity to be humanitys evolutionary successor.
(Hayles, 1999: 118, 119)
What Hayles has done here, I would argue, is to read later concerns about
cyborgs as the next step in evolution back into the early history of cyber-
netics. The move is made possible by a present-mindedness that traces a
line of development from the past to the present (Wilson & Ashplant,
1988), represented here as three overlapping waves that proceed in an
orderly progression toward the shore of the present. The role of the
founders of cybernetics is to set the cybernetic wave in motion, to disem-
body information so that it can travel across boundaries between the
organic and mechanical, to create the material and metaphorical figure of
the cyborg. The cyborg can then disrupt old notions about human auton-
omy, especially in the science fiction analyzed so well in the book.
We obtain a more contextualized answer to the question, Where are the
cyborgs in cybernetics? or to Hayless question, How did cybernetics gener-
ate cyborgs? if we look at the broader history of cybernetics. Several recent
scholars have described an enormous range of research in, and interpretations
of, the field of cybernetics in the USA, Europe, and the Soviet Union.
7
That
range is evident in Table 1, which lists areas and representative workers in the
USAand Britain fromcirca 1940 to 1970. These men and almost all of these
researchers were men, anthropologist Margaret Mead being a prominent
exception as co-editor of the proceedings of the Macy conferences identified
their work as cybernetics, as an application of cybernetics, or as associated with
cybernetics. The areas receiving the most attention in American popular media
at the time were automation and automata (robots), not cyborgs.
8
TABLE 1
Areas of research and practice in Cybernetics, ca. 19401970 (United States and Britain)
Representative workers
Automation and Control Wiener, Diebold, Beer, Tsien
Automata and Computers Ashby, Walter, Shannon, Bigelow
Information Theory Wiener, Shannon, MacKay
Neurophysiology McCulloch, Pitts, Lettvin, Walter, Rosenblueth
Biology Quastler, George
Bioastronautics Kline and Clynes
Bionics McCulloch, Von Foerster
Prosthetics Wiener
Philosophy of Science Wiener, Rosenblueth, Northrop, MacKay
Psychiatry Kubie, Bateson
Anthropology & Psychology Bateson, Mead, Bavelas
Political Science and Politics Deutsch, Beer
Technology Policy Wiener, Dechert, Halacy
Management Diebold, Beer
Music Pask, Barrons
Sources: Ashby (1952); Bateson (1972); Bavelas (1952); Beer (1969); Dechert (1966);
Deutsch (1963); Diebold (1952, 1958); Dunbar-Hester (2009); George (1965); Halacy
(1965a, 1965b); Kline & Clynes (1961); Kubie (1953); MacKay (1969); McCulloch (1965);
Mead (1951); Northrop (1948); Pask & McKinnon-Wood (1965); Quastler (1953);
Rosenblueth et al. (1943, 1949); Shannon (1948, 1952); Tsien (1954); von Foerster (1960,
1963a); Walter (1950, 1951, 1969); Wiener (1948, 1950b, 1964).
I include information theory as an area of cybernetics in Table 1 because
most of my actors did so in the 1950s. In that first age of info-hype, sparked
by the popularity of Wieners Cybernetics, a large number of physical and
social scientists applied information theory to their fields. These included the
areas on my list for cybernetics, as well as physics, statistics, linguistics, eco-
nomics, organizational sociology, communication studies, and library and
information science. By 1960 the followers of Bell Laboratories mathemati-
cian Claude Shannon had drawn sharp boundaries around the highly math-
ematical discipline of information theory in order to protect it from
enthusiastic researchers who were applying it non-mathematically to every-
thing from photosynthesis to religion (Kline, 2004).
In contrast, the founders of cybernetics had defined themselves as
transdisciplinary from the very beginning (Bowker, 1993). The members of
the Macy conferences on cybernetics, chaired by Warren McCulloch, a
neurophysiologist then at the University of Illinois Medical School, looked
to mathematics, control and communication engineering, and the nascent
field of computer design for models to apply to the neurological, social, and
behavioral sciences (Heims, 1991). After the demise of the Macy confer-
ences in 1953, cyberneticians created other organizations to promote their
field: the International Association for Cybernetics, founded in Belgium in
1956; the American Society for Cybernetics, established in 1964; and the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Professional Group on
Systems Science and Cybernetics, founded in 1965. These groups pro-
vided institutional support for cybernetics in the USA and Europe, and
function to this day.
9
We can find cyborgs in four areas of cybernetics: prosthetics, bioastro-
nautics, bionics, and technology policy. Later, writers and film directors
often blurred the boundaries between robots and cyborgs in the first
Terminator movie, for example, where the Cyberdyne System Model 101,
identified as a cyborg in the movie, is a barely organic cyborg, merely a
human skin over a complete robot (Gray et al., 1995: 2). Early robots in
cybernetics included exemplars such as: Wieners moth/bedbug (Wiener,
1950b: 19195) and W. Grey Walters tortoises (Walter, 1950, 1951),
which moved toward or away from the light; W. Ross Ashbys homeostat,
which simulated the random adaptation of an organism to its environ-
ment (Ashby, 1952), and Shannons electromechanical mouse, which
learned to run mazes (Shannon, 1952). But these did not have an organic
component and, consequently, would not fall under the (rather broad)
scholarly usage of the term cyborg (Gray et al., 1995; Lewis, 1997: 57).
As noted by Hayles (1999: 141), these early robots were cybernetic mech-
anisms, not cyborgs.
Cyborgs in Cybernetics: Wiener and Prosthetics
Wieners work on prosthetics was an early area in which a prominent cyber-
netician combined humans and machines into integrated information sys-
tems what would later be called cyborgs. In February 1949, Wiener
publicly announced that MIT was developing a hearing aid for the deaf
(Anonymous, 1949a). The device which was being developed at MITs
military-funded Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), where Wiener
advised the communications group converted spoken sounds into vibra-
tions sensed by a persons fingertips (Fig. 2). In the mechanism, code
named Project Felix, a microphone converted sound waves into electrical
signals, which were broken up into signals representing five octaves. These
were amplified and converted into mechanical vibrations applied to each
finger.
10
Theoretically, a unique pattern of vibrations was generated for
each phoneme. Once the bugs were worked out of the system, the labora-
tory, which had built a prototype based on Wieners suggestions, intended
to miniaturize it into a portable hearing glove. Deaf people could improve
their speech by comparing the patterns of vibrations they created when
speaking into the microphone with those created by non-deaf speakers.
Presumably, the device would also act as a regular hearing aid to translate
speech into sensory patterns (Wiener, 1950a).
Unfortunately, there were many bugs to be worked out in a device that
Wiener had prematurely described in a public lecture and in academic jour-
nals (Wiener, 1949; Wiesner, Wiener & Levine, 1949). In December 1949,
Wiener again touted the device, this time in a lecture on sensory prosthesis
at the American Mathematical Society (Wiener, 1951a). The address drew
FIGURE 2
MITs Felix Hearing Aid, from Wiener (1950b: 202).
more media coverage than the talk in February. The New York Times
(Anonymous, 1949b), an Associated Press newspaper story,
11
and Life mag-
azine (Anonymous, 1950: 17) heralded the new wonder coming from the lab
of the famous founder of cybernetics.
The bugs lasted from the outset of the project to its demise. In the fall
of 1949, the RLE reported that the five-channel system failed to differen-
tiate the phonemes adequately, but that a seven-channel unit gave a
unique pattern for each phoneme. The projects group studied electrical
stimulation of the skin and thought it would work better than mechanical
vibrations (Wiesner & Levine, 1949: 55). In January 1950, the group
addressed these problems by testing copper electrodes to electrically stim-
ulate a subjects forearm on a seven-channel unit (Wiesner et al., 1950a).
In the spring, they used a different type of microphone and added a ran-
dom-noise generator to tune the device (Wiener et al., 1950b), all to no
avail. The group reported that summer that Felix has operational short-
comings. Whenever the subjects ability to receive words varied substan-
tially from one test to another, we could not ascertain to what degree this
was the fault of the subject or of the equipment (Wiesner et al., 1950c).
Digitizing the amplitude of the signals did not help (Howland et al., 1951).
During this period, MIT and Wiener were kept busy explaining to
impatient parents of deaf children, and also to an aged Helen Keller who
tried out the device in the lab, that it was still in the experimental stage.
Keller wrote Wiener, I can never be too grateful when I reflect that you
have said the experiments you are trying out for the deaf are the first con-
structive application of cybernetics to human beings.
12
Wiener stopped
working on Project Felix around the time he severed relations with Jerome
Wiesner, associate director of the RLE and the head researcher on the proj-
ect, in 19511952,
13
and the project languished.
14
Wiener also stopped
advising a project at the lab to design a photocell device, connected to ear-
phones, as a navigational aid for the blind (Wiener, 1950a: 20406).
The hearing glove is a good example of what Hayles calls technical
cyborgs, although she does not mention the device. Information is
extracted from sound waves in a disembodied form so it can travel across
the boundary between the machine (the electrical filters) and the organism
(the human hand). In fact, Wiener described the gloves operation in terms
of amount of information, a key concept that he and Shannon had inde-
pendently developed in information theory (Kline, 2004). Hayles (1999:
chap. 3) rightly identifies the theory as the site for the scientific disembod-
iment of information, a prelude to creating electronic cyborgs. Wiener
called the hearing aid an artificial external cortex (Wiener, 1949: 261;
1950b: 201). This is the type of comment that inspired Marshall McLuhan
(who admired Wiener
15
) a decade later to talk about telecommunications
as the artificial nervous systems that humans wear outside of their bodies
(McLuhan, 1964: 4346, 57, 68).
At the same time he was working on the hearing glove, Wiener started
thinking about another way to create cyborgs: artificial homeostasis, the exter-
nal cybernetic control of a homeostatic physiological function in animals. In
1951 he described the recent invention of a mechanical anesthetist at the
Mayo Clinic that automatically regulated the administration of anesthesia to
an animal or human based on feedback from an electroencephalogram
(EEG). Wiener called it an artificial chain of homeostasis combining elements
in the body and elements outside, and noted that the principle could be
applied in other areas such as medicating the heart (Wiener, 1951b: 66). He
later predicted that this form of artificial homeostasis would be used to treat
patients with diabetes with insulin (Wiener, 1953: 9293).
Toward the end of his life (he died in 1964), Wiener worked a great deal
in these areas, placing prosthetics and artificial homeostasis in the area of
medical cybernetics and the analysis of brain waves, for example, in the
area of neurocybernetics (Wiener & Schad, 1963: 1). In 1965, Ronald
Rothchild, a masters student in mechanical engineering at MIT, designed
and built an artificial arm controlled by amplified electromyographic
(EMG) signals from the amputated muscle. The resulting Boston Arm was
inspired by Wieners ideas on the subject in the early 1960s (Mann, 1997:
40205; Conway & Siegelman, 2005: 32224). In 1963, Wiener proposed
the idea of implanting a syringe into diabetes patients to give them auto-
matic injections of insulin based on feedback monitoring, which Wiener
again referred to as artificial homeostasis.
16
He may have discussed this
type of cyborg in conversations he had with a Lockheed scientist on apply-
ing cybernetics to space flight earlier in 1963, or with Manfred Clynes at a
control-systems conference in Russia in the summer of 1960, when Clynes
was in the midst of his research on cyborgs and bioastronautics.
17
What bet-
ter way to describe the material cyborg, in fact, than an organism with arti-
ficial homeostasis?
Bioastronautics: The Cyborg Concept
The debt Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline, the creators of the cyborg
technique, owed to cybernetics is clear. In May 1960, shortly before they
delivered their paper to a symposium on the psychophysiological aspects of
space flight, held at the Air Forces School of Aviation Medicine in Texas,
a reporter asked Kline how they came up with the cyborg concept.
We were asked to present a paper on drugs for space flight, he said, and
this naturally led to a question of how they would be administered. This
would have to be done automatically, of course, and this led us to appli-
cations of cybernetics to the problem. From this we established a whole
new approach based on adapting the man to the environment rather than
keeping him in a sort of environment to which he was naturally adapted.
(Anonymous, 1960a)
Clynes and Kline proposed that humans could endure the rigors of long
space flights, to Mars for example, by becoming cybernetically extended
organisms. Like the cyborg mouse of Fig. 1, humans would be uncon-
sciously injected with drugs to control their physiological functions a
form of artificial homeostasis so they could explore the vastness of space
without cumbersome space suits and other life-support equipment.
Artificial organs would further reduce their physiological needs. Ironically,
Clynes and Kline thought that becoming a cyborg in this manner would
thus free humans from their machines, from all the equipment needed to
create an earth-like environment in space. In a recent interview, Clynes
said he did not think that joining humans to machines in this manner
would change the nature of being human (Gray, 1995a), the concern of sci-
ence-fiction writers, social scientists, and humanists since the 1960s.
The partner most familiar with cybernetics was Clynes. After receiving
a bachelors degree in physics from the University of Melbourne in 1945,
Clynes, an accomplished pianist, took courses on physiological acoustics
and psychomotor coordination at the Juilliard School of Music, where he
obtained a masters degree in 1949; he then studied the psychology of
music on a Fulbright Fellowship. He joined Rockland State Hospital in
1956 as Chief Research Scientist in charge of the Dynamic Simulation
Laboratory. At Rockland, Clynes specialized in applying computer tech-
niques and feedback theory to understanding homeostatic physiological
functions, a field that was becoming known as biocybernetics.
18
Soon
after joining Rockland, he met Warren McCulloch, who had worked at the
hospital in the 1930s (Heims, 1991: 129, 133). A major figure in the net-
work of cybernetics following the Macy conferences, McCulloch was
impressed with Clyness research, giving his grant application to the
National Science Foundation the highest rating and supporting his appli-
cation for senior membership in the Institute of Radio Engineers.
19
McCulloch was also impressed with how Kline had put the Rockland hos-
pital on the research map after the war.
20
By 1961, Clynes had published
almost a dozen papers on the application of control-system theory to phys-
iology (Clynes, 1961: 969), and Kline was well-known for his work on psy-
chiatric drugs.
Theirs was a fruitful collaboration for creating the radical idea of the
cyborg technique for space medicine, of implanting cybernetic devices into
astronauts so they could endure long space flights and explore planets.
Clynes and Kline called the optimistic enterprise participant evolution,
and predicted that this human-controlled endeavor would drastically
reduce the time it would take natural evolution to adapt humans to the
environments of outer space. For them, The challenge of space travel to
mankind is not only to his technological prowess, it is also a spiritual chal-
lenge to take an active part in his own biological evolution (Kline &
Clynes, 1961: 344, 345, 361).
The term cyborg and representations of the space cyborg quickly entered
popular culture. A few days before the Air Force symposium at which Clynes
and Kline introduced the term in May 1960, the New York Times published a
laypersons definition of the cyborg in an article about their paper, based on a
press release and interviews with the authors. A cyborg is essentially a man-
machine system in which the control mechanisms of the human portion are
modified externally by drugs or regulatory devices so that the being can live in
an environment different from the normal one (Anonymous, 1960a). In July,
an artist illustrated the futuristic vision of Clynes and Kline for a photo essay
in Life magazine, nearly a year before the Russians launched the first human
into space (Fig. 3). In the drawing, two cyborg astronauts, part-human, part-
machine, explore the Moons surface in skin-tight space suits. Their lips sealed,
but their eyes open (probably to give them a more human appearance), the
cyborgs breathe by artificial lungs and communicate through radios activated
by voice nerves. An array of tubes on their belts infuse chemicals to control
homeostatically their blood pressure, pulse, body temperature, and radiation
tolerance (Anonymous, 1960b).
The illustration seems to come straight out of a science-fiction novel.
Indeed, it was more futuristic than most contemporary science fiction in the
USA from the 1930s to the 1950s, which had depicted cyborg-like entities
mainly as disembodied brains (Lewis, 1997). One novel published in 1948,
Scanners Live in Vain, by Cordwainer Smith, did portray entities similar to
the cyborgs of Kline and Clynes. In the novel, future humans elect to have
their bodies altered as cyborg scanners in order to travel in space. The sen-
sory inputs to their brains are bypassed, so they do not feel pain, and are sent
FIGURE 3
Vision of Cyborgs on the Moon, from LIFE Magazine (11 July 1960, pp. 77. Artwork
by Fred Freeman).
instead to a chest brainbox, which the cyborgs continuously monitor (scan)
for their physiological conditions while exploring outer space (Lewis, 1997:
7983). Cyborgs are not depicted as specially-fitted space explorers again in
American science fiction until the mid 1960s (pp. 14248).
Although clearly futuristic, the Life illustration accurately depicts the
technical proposals made by Clynes and Kline in their 1960 symposium
paper. The cyborg concept was too drastic, however, for one reader of Life.
A self-identified technologist wrote the editor that he was profoundly
shocked by the inhuman proposal ... for the manufacture of Cyborgs,
artificially de-humanized, mechanized monsters. The editor reassured him
and other readers that Cyborgs would be humans with some organs only
temporarily altered or replaced by mechanical devices. On returning to
earth the devices would be removed and normal body functions restored
(Shelley & Editor, 1960).
Bioastronautics: NASAs Cyborg Study
As radical as these ideas seemed at the time (and perhaps even today), the
space-medicine community took them seriously. A trade-journal account
of the 1960 Air Force symposium said that most of the participants rec-
ommended surrounding astronauts with as much of an earth-like environ-
ment as possible, such as breathable air and artificial gravity. But a
minority report filed by several of the experts questioned whether it might
not be wiser to change man, making him more adaptable to space condi-
tions as they are. A psychologist suggested using hypnosis; a professor of
surgery recommended hypothermia. The most imaginative alteration in
man was the cyborg concept proposed by Clynes and Kline (Beller, 1960:
38, 40). Another writer described how the Cyborg, a man-machine sys-
tem would help solve the vexing problem of protecting astronauts from the
radiation in outer space. A servo-mechanism would signal an increase in
radiation count, and trigger the administration of anti-radiation drugs
(David, 1960: 40).
NASA took notice and funded research on the cyborg technique. The
United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) in Connecticut presented a proposal to
the life sciences unit at NASAs Ames Research Center in April 1962.
21
That
August the newly formed Division of Biotechnology and Human Research,
a branch of a reorganized Office of Advanced Research and Technology
(OART) at NASA headquarters (Pitts, 1985: 78, 80), signed an 8-month
contract with UACs bioastronautics unit to conduct a study of cyborgs in
space (David, 1963b: 43). Heading a group of seven researchers, including
medical doctors, physiologists, and engineers, director Robert Driscoll issued
an interim report in January 1963 and a final report, entitled Engineering
Man for Space: The Cyborg Study, that May (Driscoll, 1963: I-1, I-3). The
nearly 200-page document presented the results of Phase I of the contract, a
feasibility study of five aspects of the cyborg concept: artificial organs,
hypothermia, drugs, sensory deprivation, and cardiovascular models.
Although the study referenced the symposium paper by Kline and Clynes
only once (III-28), it explicitly stated their concept of the cyborg technique
and its broad implications. Circumventing the slow process of natural selec-
tion by integrating man with machine makes possible the special man with
increased functional capabilities. This is the Cyborg, the cybernetically con-
trolled man who functions servomechanistically to cope with environments
he does not fully comprehend (II-1).
The optimistic goal was introduced in the section on artificial organs
(lungs, heart, and kidney). The section concluded, however, that the exten-
sive equipment required to support artificial organs at that time would not
permit them to be used in space flights in the near future. The real signif-
icance of research into artificial organs lies in their use as experimental
analogs for substitution into test conditions for evaluation without risking
human life (II-33, his emphasis). The report was more optimistic about
hypothermia, predicting that the bulky equipment required to support it
could be reduced in size and that the process could be automated for space
travel within 5 to 15 years (III-1718). More research was needed on drugs
to induce hypothermia and to control the psychophysiology of astronauts
(IV-13). The Cyborg Study also argued that sensory deprivation was an
important factor to consider because of the recent experience of astronauts
orbiting the earth (V-1).
Moving from literature surveys and theoretical speculations to experi-
mental research, UAC built electrical and mechanical models of the human
cardiovascular system, which they verified through experiments on ani-
mals. The goal was to understand how human physiology fared in simu-
lated space environments, in order to establish a medical basis that could
be used to create the type of cyborgs advocated by Clynes and Kline. In
this regard, they referred to Clyness recent research on the biocybernetics
of cardiovascular systems (Driscoll, 1963: VI-13).
For Phase II of the Cyborg Study, which began in May 1963 (David,
1963b), the UAC dropped the areas directly related to building cyborgs
(artificial organs, hypothermia, and drugs), proposed to continue their
work on space medicine (the biocybernetic modeling of cardiovascular and
other systems), and offered to design systems that addressed pressing needs
of the space program (ways to overcome sensory deprivation and the
observed loss of calcium during space flights) (Driscoll, 1963: VII-3).
Although the life-support systems contradicted the cyborg technique of
Clynes and Kline by providing earth-like environments, the report restated
the goals of that technique, albeit in a qualified manner.
Out of the CYBORG program we will be able to understand considerably
more about man, his systems and his subsystems. Methods for augment-
ing and extending his limitations, which will be compatible with the state
of the art and the applicability of man in a space mission[,] will be derived
from CYBORG in an effort to obtain the maximum integration of man
into a man-machine complex (Driscoll,1963: VII-4).
While the eventual goal of this integration may have been the radically aug-
mented and extended cyborg of Clynes and Kline, the UAC researchers
emphasized their plans to conduct long-term research in Biocybernetics
(Driscoll, 1963: VII-1), of creating models to study human physiology in
simulated space environments. The analogical method resonated well with
Wieners definition of cybernetics. This emphasis is evident in the reports
concluding lines. A significant number of experiments will be performed
on animals and man throughout this program to verify the modeling con-
cepts which have evolved from the CYBORG theory, an allusion to
Clyness biocybernetics papers, not to the cyborg paper of Kline and
Clynes. In this way CYBORG will have accomplished its mission by pro-
viding a better understanding of the biological design of man and relating
the impact of this understanding to compatible hardware systems
(Driscoll, 1963: VII-45).
Apparently neither the long-term scientific goal nor the short-term design
proposals were enough to continue the Cyborg Study. I have found only three
references to it after UAC issued the final report on Phase I in May 1963: a
brief account in a trade journal of Phase II as an ongoing project (Anonymous,
1963: 89), a speech by Eugene Konecci, director of NASAs Biotechnology
and Human Research Division, reviewing NASA projects to an international
astronautic congress in September 1964,
22
and a reference to the United
Aircraft Cyborg Project in a 1965 book on bionics (Halacy, 1965a: 173).
UAC doesnt seem to have issued a report on Phase II.
It is not clear why the project was discontinued,
23
but NASA archives
indicate some dissatisfaction with it. In August 1963, 3 months into Phase II,
UAC submitted a three-page progress report to Frank Voris, director of the
Human Research section of OART, detailing three research projects: in bio-
cybernetics (intensive experiments on blood pressure information sent to a
dogs brain); mineral metabolism (early stage of human experiments on loss
of calciumunder immobilization); and sensory deprivation (proposed human
experiments on psychological effects).
24
The report did not satisfy. Two weeks later, Voris asked three
researchers in space medicine at a private laboratory, the Lockheed
Company, and Brooks Air Force Base to review the Cyborg Study. Voris
acknowledged that changes in NASA management during the course of the
project had resulted in a change of direction for it, then laid out his con-
cerns. Presently there exists in the minds of some of us a question of
whether the company has produced results commensurate with the monies
spent. Also, there is some doubt as to the capability of the company to suc-
cessfully pursue further work under this contract. He asked for their
expert opinions as to whether the NASA should continue to support this
effort, and, if so, to what extent?
25
Despite these problems, Warren McCulloch, who was an adviser to
Voriss division, asked NASA for a copy of the cyborg report in December
1964.
26
McCullochs involvement is not surprising because of his ubiqui-
tous presence in cybernetics in the USA. More specifically, he was also a
member of the Biocybernetics Committee of the Aerospace Medical
Association, which Konecci chaired.
27
The fact that Konecci, a proponent
of biocybernetics, resigned from NASA in 1964 (Pitts, 1985: 8687) may
help explain the demise of the Cyborg Study. NASA went on to build many
cyborgs the core of its manned space program but not the type pro-
posed by Clynes and Kline.
Bionics: From Living Prototypes to Prostheses and
Human Augmentation
In 1960, the very year that Clynes and Kline coined the termcyborg, another
Air Force symposium christened a new field with the name bionics. Bionics
later became known as the engineering term for working on the idea of
cyborgs (Gray, 1995b: 64) and, as an adjective, for a cyborg figure, as in the
bionic man. Yet the original purpose of the Cold War discipline of bionics
was to imitate organic systems in the design of complex electronic systems, to
borrow ideas from living prototypes, not to create cyborgs.
The beginnings of bionics owe a debt to the research of McCulloch
and Pitts on neural nets, to Wiener on cybernetics, and to the Biological
Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois, established in 1958 by
Heinz von Foerster (an Austrian emigre physicist, chief editor of the pro-
ceedings of the Macy conferences on cybernetics, and the instigator of
Hayless second wave of cybernetics). The BCL was a small lab; it was not
as well known as MITs Research Laboratory of Electronics, which
McCulloch had joined in 1952. Von Foerster used the term biological
computer to mean a computer that mimicked the information-processing
functions of biological organisms, such as the pattern recognition per-
formed by a frogs eye, the subject of a well-known paper by McCullochs
group at MIT (Lettvin et al., 1959). The Biological Computer Laboratory
and other centers of bionics, such as those at Cornell University, Bell
Telephone Laboratories, General Electric, and the Radio Corporation of
America, sought to build computers from artificial neural nets, not from
biological elements (Corneretto, 1960; Von Foerster, 1960).
Von Foerster established the laboratory as a center for cybernetics on
the basis of a grant from the Office of Naval Research; it received most of
its funding from the Air Force and some from the National Science
Foundation (NSF).
28
Ross Ashby was funded by the laboratory after he
moved from Britain to join the University of Illinois in 1961 (Von Foerster,
1963b: 1). McCulloch consulted on the project, and his staff at MIT sent
electronic neurons to Illinois.
29
Military agencies funded the Illinois lab and
other projects in bionics because they thought biological organisms which
had adapted robustly to their environments through evolution could pro-
vide clues on how to solve the reliability problems endemic to the complex
electronic systems used to fight the Cold War (Savely, 1961).
30
Major Jack Steele of the Air Forces Aerospace Medical Division recalls
coining the term bionics from Greek roots in the late 1950s to mean using
principles derived from living systems in the solution of design problems
(Gray, 1995b: 62). Seven-hundred scientists and engineers from several dis-
ciplines in the cold-war militaryindustrialacademic complex attended the
first Bionics Symposium, held at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in
Ohio in 1960 (Lipetz, 1961). Steele and John Keto, Chief Scientist at the
Wright Air Development Division, organized the symposium, McCulloch
chaired a technical session, and von Foerster wrote the preface to the con-
ference proceedings (United States Air Force, Wright Air Development
Division, 1961). The Air Force sponsored three more symposia in the
1960s, which popularized bionics as a new area flush with military funding,
reported to be $100 million in 1963 (Heinley, 1963: 36).
In his keynote address to the first symposium, Keto said the new science
aimed to cross-couple the know-how we have achieved, or are achieving,
concerning live prototypes toward the solution of engineering problems
(Keto, 1961: 7). In an encyclopedia article on bionics, von Foerster defined
it more extensively as:
FIGURE 4
United States Air Force, Wright Air Development Division (1961)
a new engineering science that in general applies organizational principles
of living organisms to the solution of engineering problems. In particular,
it considers living organisms as prototypes in dealing with the theory, cir-
cuitry, and technology of information-processing electronic components,
systems of such components, and compounds of such systems. (Von
Foerster, 1963a: 148)
Thus, the founders of bionics, as well as early workers in the field, did not view
bionics as a merger of biology and electronics that produced cyborgs, as
implied by later interpretations of the word bionics itself and the symbol cho-
sen for the Air Force symposia: a mathematical integration sign holding a
scalpel at one end and a soldering iron at the other (Fig. 4) (Steele, 1961).
The present-day cyborgian meaning of bionics, the technological enhance-
ment of humans to give them super-human capabilities, dates to the popular
television show, the Six Million Dollar Man in the mid 1970s.
31
The contrast between the scientific and popular meanings of bionics
is evident in one of the experimental projects von Foersters lab completed
in the early 1960s. The Numa-Rete, built in 1961, used a 20 20 array of
photo-cells connected to a network of artificial neurons to detect edges of
two-dimensional convex objects placed over the cells. By summing the dif-
ferences in the number of edges detected and dividing, Numa-Rete could
count the number of objects in its field of vision (Von Foerster, 1962,
1963b: 5). Von Foersters lab built the device from elements that resem-
bled biological organisms electronic neurons rather than programming
a digital computer to simulate perception, the competing method of sym-
bolic Artificial Intelligence (Edwards, 1996: chap. 8).
Most of the participants at the Air Force bionics symposia in the 1960s did
this type of research, focusing on the theory of neural nets and self-organizing
systems, experiments on pattern and speech recognition in animals and
machines, and artificial intelligence, rather than on cyborgs. The few cyborgs
that populate the symposia exist on the margins of the conferences, in efforts
to design prosthetic devices and human augmentations, often to operate
weapons systems. At the first bionics symposium in 1960, Keto noted the mil-
itary promise of bionics, then listed several humanitarian uses, similar to those
proposed by Wiener in the 1950s: Prosthetic devices to assist the crippled; aids
to the blind to permit them to perform in a more normal fashion; means for
restoring mans capabilities that deteriorate with age or due to disease hear-
ing, seeing and others (Keto, 1961: 10).
A few instances of this type of cyborg research, termed medical bionics
by the Air Force (David, 1963a: 34), were presented at the symposia. At the
third symposium in 1963, researchers at the Stanford Research Institute
described a way to present spatial images by tactile means to assist jet pilots
dealing with information overload (Halacy, 1965a: 172). At the Spacelab
company in California, researchers developed a myoelectric servo control
system that would enable a pilot to move his arm to certain positions in a
space capsule under heavy g loads (David, 1963a: 35). The system operated
much like a Russian artificial hand (Halacy, 1965a: 146). At the fourth sym-
posium in 1966, a researcher at the Philco Corporation described a joint
project with Temple University, funded by the US Vocational Rehabilitation
Administration, that used the new technology of integrated circuits to pro-
vide pattern recognition on EMGsignals to control a powered prosthetic arm
(Taylor, 1968: 885).
More research was conducted on prosthetics and human augmen-
tation than that presented at the bionics symposia. The Stanford
Research Institute was working on updated versions of Wieners proj-
ects: a tactile hearing aid and a photocell device for navigation by the
blind (Halacy, 1965a: 172). The Navy funded a so-called amplified
man, who would myoelectrically control powerful mechanical arms
and legs, not with levers and switches, but with thoughts (Halacy,
1965a: 14647). The Army funded giant walking machines for sol-
diers, what contractor General Electric called cybernetic anthropo-
morphic machines (Halacy, 1965b: 145). In the mid 1960s, NASA and
the Atomic Energy Commission funded a study of such teleoperators,
defining teleoperator as a general purpose, dexterous, cybernetic machine
(Johnsen & Corliss, n.d.: 85, their emphasis). The study noted that GE
called the field mechanism cybernetics (p. 87, their emphasis). Non-
military projects included an artificial arm developed at Case Institute
of Technology and funded by the US Department of Health,
Education, and Welfare, pacemakers, and baropacers to regulate blood
pressure (Halacy, 1965a: 146, 15051).
Daniel Halacys popular-science book, Bionics, included a brief descrip-
tion of these cyborgs and called NASAs Cyborg Study an important bion-
ics project (Halacy, 1965a, 173). He defined bionics as the science of
machines and systems that work in the manner of living things (p. 181).
The definition was broad enough to include the interpretation of the
founders of the field McCulloch, von Foerster, and Steele as well as the
increasing tendency to view bionics as human augmentation, the science
and engineering of cyborgs.
Technology Policy: Social Concerns about Cyborgs
A striking instance of cyborg imagery exists in the personal correspon-
dence between cyberneticians. In April 1969, Walter Pitts wrote his for-
mer collaborator on the theory of neural nets, Warren McCulloch, who
was in the hospital recovering from a heart attack. I understand you had
a light coronary ... that you are attached to many sensors connected to
panels and alarms continuously monitored by a nurse, and cannot in
consequence turn over in bed. No doubt this is cybernetical. But it all
makes me most abominably sad.
32
Walter thought he and Warren could
perhaps one day draw up their wheelchairs and chat about old times. I
interpret Pitts to mean that being cyborg-like in this manner was of sci-
entific interest, that it was cybernetical and therefore worthy of study.
But the human aspect was sad. Pitts died a month later of complications
from liver disease (Smalheiser, 2000), followed by McCulloch in
September (Pozo-Olano, 1970).
That brings us to the topic of cyborgs as a concern in technology policy,
which Ill discuss by comparing two books published in the mid 1960s.
Wieners God and Golem, Inc. (Wiener, 1964), a follow-up to The Human Use
of Human Beings (Wiener, 1950b), discusses three points where cybernetics
impinges upon religion: machines that learn, machines that reproduce them-
selves, and the coordination of humans and machines. The latter topic
included automation and prosthesis. Wiener thought that a Russian-built arti-
ficial arm that operated from the amputees EMG signals really makes use of
cybernetical ideas. He praised it as an example of the construction of systems
of a mixed nature, involving both human and mechanical parts. Although
Wiener had warned the public for over a decade about the possible adverse
consequences of cybernetics, especially through the advent of automatic fac-
tories and military applications, and although he had mentioned potential
dangers in human augmentation in 1950 (Wiener, 1950b: 195), he did not
warn readers of God and Golem about the dangers of a new engineering of
prostheses (Wiener, 1964: 74, 76).
The thrust of a more sensational, journalistic book, Halacys Cyborg
Evolution of the Superman (Halacy, 1965b), was to educate readers about the
promises and dangers of the evolution of humans into cyborgs and the cyborg
into a superman. Recognizing that humans have linked themselves with
machines for centuries in a cyborg-like manner, Halacy worried about a
speed-up in this process in the present. For better or for worse we are com-
mitted to what Clynes and Kline have termed participant evolution. Man
himself is now an important factor in his own development. Scientists and
engineers had lately turned science fiction into fact by creating artificial arms,
pacemakers, and remote-controlled drones. Halacy, who wrote the book
Bionics mentioned earlier, praised bionics as an offshoot science of cybernet-
ics, one that had a more apt and readily understood name. Although Halacy
imagined a bleak future in which cyborgs warred against humans the theme
of the Terminator movie 20 years later he was not worried about the fate of
humans. Since we cannot stop participant evolution, he reasoned, it was best
to guide it in humane ways (Halacy, 1965b: 15, 41).
The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke was even more optimistic:
I suppose one could call a man in an iron lung a Cyborg, but the concept
has far wider implications that this. One day we may be able to enter into
temporary unions with any sufficiently sophisticated machines, thus being
able not merely to control but to become a spaceship or a submarine or a
TV network .... when the individual human consciousness is free to roam
at will from machine to machine, through all the reaches of sea and sky
and space ... . If this eventually happens and I have given good reasons
for thinking that it must we have nothing to regret, and certainly noth-
ing to fear. (Clarke, 1962: 22627, his emphasis)
These hopes and fears were amplified and reworked in the 1970s by other
science-fiction writers (Lewis, 1997: chap. 6), futurists (for example, Rorvik,
1971; Stritch, 1972), and a budding literature on STS (for example,
Krajewski, 1977).
Why are There so Few Cyborgs in Cybernetics?
My detailed account of where the cyborgs are in cybernetics in prosthetics,
bioastronautics, bionics, and technology policy may leave the impression
that cyborgs were a central concern in cybernetics. They were not. I have
found only a handful of material cyborgs described in the major cybernetic
texts published from 1948 to about 1970. In medicine and physiology, we
have Wieners hearing glove, aids for the blind, and proposals for myoelec-
trically controlled prosthetic arms and artificial homeostasis; updated ver-
sions of these systems in the 1960s (Clark, 1969); the myoelectric control
systems presented at the Air Force symposia on bionics; and the now-famous
technical report on NASAs Cyborg Study, inspired by the two papers pub-
lished by Clynes and Kline.
Concerns about cyborgs (in a material and an imaginary sense) were evi-
dent in the journalistic literature on the social implications of cybernetics in the
1960s, but most of those who wrote about cybernetics and society up to that
time were much more concerned about automation than about cyborgs (for
example, Chase, 1950; Dechert, 1966). Only a few cyberneticians worried
about cyborgs. I have noted Wieners warnings about augmentation. John
Diebold, the automation expert and US director of the International
Cybernetics Association, warned in 1969, Even now the creation of cyborgs
men with artificial organs has begun, a prospect that might threaten future
generations by bypassing the evolutionary process (Diebold, 1969: 145).
We can find a few cyborgs outside of medicine and physiology by con-
sidering assemblages of humans and machines joined together and to their
environments cybernetically (through feedback control) in order to per-
form a non-medical function. British cybernetician Stafford Beers adaptive
computerized management systems for firms (Beer, 1969) are good exam-
ples of this type of cyborg, as noted by Pickering (2002: 424). The musi-
colour machine of Beers colleague, Gordon Pask, which allowed a
performer to interact with a musical instrument via feedback from colored
lights keyed adaptively to the instruments sounds (Pask & McKinnon-
Wood, 1965), is also cyborg-like in this manner.
Outside of the writings of Wiener, Diebold, Beer, and Pask, I have found
no references to cyborgs in the work of early cyberneticians in the USA and
Britain. Cyborgs whether related to medicine and physiology or not are not
mentioned in McCullochs collected papers, Embodiments of Mind
(McCulloch, 1965), von Foersters publications relating to the Biological
Computing Laboratory, Ashbys major works, including An Introduction to
Cybernetics (Ashby, 1956), or in Gregory Batesons Steps to an Ecology of Mind,
which develops an epistemology of cybernetics (Bateson, 1972: 31519).
Cyborgs in medicine and physiology did not turn up in my search of the
English-language cybernetics journals through 1971 (Cybernetica, est. 1958,
and IEEE Transactions on Systems Science and Cybernetics, est. 1965), the pro-
ceedings of the conference that succeeded the Macy conferences through 1971
(Proceedings of the International Congress of Cybernetics, est. 1958), and the
Journal of Cybernetics during its first three volumes (19711973). These serials
described a few cyborgs outside of medicine and physiology, the systems of
Beer and Pask. But they were in the minority. The cybernetic publications
focused, instead, on automata, neural nets, biological systems, and social sys-
tems not cyborgs all analyzed under the cybernetic principles of feedback
control, homeostasis, and information processing.
Why are there relatively few cyborgs in the first two decades of cybernet-
ics? I would argue that the chief texts of cybernetics in these years are mainly
concerned with analogies between humans and machines, not the fusion of
humans and machines. Participants at the Macy conferences talked endlessly
about howthe human brain and nervous systemfunctioned like electronic dig-
ital computers and electrical control and communication systems (Heims,
1991). Ross Ashby stated this point clearly at the conference in 1952. We can
consider the living mouse as being essentially similar to the clockwork mouse
and we can use the same physical principles and the same objective method
in the study of both (Ashby, 1953: 73). The method of analogy, of creating
models applicable to animate and inanimate beings alike, applied equally to
Ashbys homeostat, the research by McCulloch and his colleagues on neural
nets, and the entire field of bionics.
The cybernetics journals and proceedings are filled with models, often
highly mathematical models, of systems ranging from the cell to society.
Ashby carried the method of analogy to such an extreme that he designed the
homeostat to copy precisely the adaptive behavior of the brain, not to
improve it. ... if the living brain fails in certain characteristic ways, then I
want my artificial brain to fail too; for such failure would be valid evidence
that the model was a true copy (Ashby, 1952: 130). The method of analogy
also held in the lab. Wieners moth/bedbug modeled a Parkinsonian tremor
(Wiener, 1950b: 195). When Wiener and physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth
studied a nervous disorder in cats, they spoke in the engineering terms of
amount of information and feedback (Rosenblueth et al., 1949). In
Cybernetics and Biology, British psychologist F.H. George stated flatly that
Cybernetics is concerned with models (George, 1965: 30).
The locus classicus of the analogy principle is, of course, Wieners original
definition of cybernetics as the entire field of control and communication the-
ory, whether in the machine or in the animal (Wiener, 1948: 19, my empha-
sis). Although the analogic method of cybernetics blurs the boundaries between
humans and machines, Wiener did not speak in terms of fusing humans with
machines when describing the cyborg hearing glove. He only engaged in
cyborg talk when describing artificial homeostasis in medicine. Since the main
aim of cybernetics was to model existing biological, mechanical, and social sys-
tems using the same principles, it is not surprising that the few cyborgs that do
exist in cybernetics are found in areas such as prosthetics and bioastronautics,
which created new systems combining humans with machines.
From a History of Cyborgs to a History of Cybernetics
The existence of material cyborgs as a minor, mostly medical research area in
cybernetics, which included space medicine, points to the criticisms I raised in
the introduction about recent studies of cyborgs and cybernetics. In an earlier
section, I critiqued Hayles (1999) for reading later social concerns about
cyborgs into the early history of cybernetics. In this section, I extend my criti-
cism of histories of cybernetics that ignore the multiple interpretations of that
discipline, which I presented briefly in the introduction (Bowker, 1993;
Galison, 1994; Kay, 2000: chap. 3). I focus on Bowkers claims about a uni-
versal cybernetics discourse in order to propose a basis for reinterpreting the
history of cybernetics in the USA and Britain.
In many respects, prominent English-speaking cyberneticians, in the
period from about 1945 to 1970, did interpret their new science as univer-
sal in the manner analyzed by Bowker. They saw cybernetics as a universal
discipline or metascience that provided through the principles of control
and communication engineering a universal, analogic method that could
analyze all complex systems, from the level of the cell to that of society. The
universal language of cybernetics, expressed in terms of feedback, control,
information, and homeostasis (Gerovitch, 2002, chap 2), enabled researchers
to apply cybernetic concepts to the broad range of fields listed in Table 1.
And several cyberneticians did use the rhetorical strategy of legitimacy
exchange to reciprocally link their field with established disciplines and gar-
ner research grants (Bowker, 1993: 116).
Although cyberneticians agreed on the universal character of their field
when they engaged in the metadiscourse of cybernetics analyzed by Bowker,
they disagreed on many points, even on how to interpret their field. The wide-
spread interest in cybernetics led to multiple meanings of the term. The entry
on cybernetics in the second edition of the International Encyclopedia of the
Social Sciences noted confusion, vagueness, and conflicting attitudes toward
cybernetics and what its subject matter really is. The author, M.E. Maron, a
researcher in artificial intelligence at the RAND Corporation, identified three
major meanings of cybernetics: a collection of information-processing
research techniques; automation; and a new science that could analyze all
complex systems, from machines to society itself, in terms of a common lan-
guage of information and control (Maron, 1968: 5).
These multiple interpretations existed below the metadiscourse of cyber-
netics as a universal discipline. At the local level of their own research, work-
ers tended to interpret cybernetics fromthe point of viewof their specialty and
social concerns, a point noted by a sociological study of cybernetics conducted
in the early 1970s (Apter, 1972: 112). Ironically, most cyberneticians were
specialists. McCulloch wrote about the philosophy of cybernetics, but focused
his research on neurophysiology (McCulloch, 1965). Von Foerster helped
establish the radical epistemology of second-order cybernetics (Hayles,
1999: chap. 6), but conducted his laboratory research on bionics. Ashby con-
sidered the heart of cybernetics to be a theory of all machines, organic and
inorganic (Ashby, 1956). Philosophers and computer scientists saw cybernet-
ics as synonymous with the theory of automata (Gunderson, 1967; Edwards,
1996: chap. 8), engineers as a synonym for control theory (Tsien, 1954).
Diebold specialized in the management side of automation (Diebold, 1952),
which was often called cybernation at the time (for example, McLuhan,
1966). Wiener was the exception in crossing over into many areas to promote
the new science of cybernetics (see Table 1).
The coinage of specific names for these area-specific meanings bio-
cybernetics, neurocybernetics, medical cybernetics, behavioral cybernetics,
management cybernetics, engineering cybernetics (for example, Rose,
1969) indicates a level of separation between the subfields of a maturing
discipline. In commenting in the early 1980s on an Introduction to
Neurocybernetics written by Wiener and Schad (1963), Ross Ashby gave
his interpretation of Wieners view on these matters. Attributing the first
part of the introduction to Wiener, Ashby said It discusses the applications
of cybernetics to biological phenomena, and makes clear that Wiener in no
way thinks of cybernetics as being a simple unifying principle but as a sci-
ence of ever-expanding content (Ashby, 1985: 408).
Despite his conception of cybernetics as a wide-ranging science,
Wiener recognized some limits to cybernetics and was skeptical about
applying it to social sciences like anthropology and economics. He thought
they did not have enough consistent data collected over a long enough
period of time to use the mathematical techniques for analyzing time-series
to make an accurate prediction (Wiener, 1948: 3334, 189191; Heims,
1991: 28, 193), the World War II research from which he developed his
cybernetic ideas (Masani, 1990: chap. 4; Galison, 1994). Wiener main-
tained this attitude even after extending cybernetics to social issues in The
Human Use of Human Beings (Wiener, 1950b).
33
The extensive enthusiasm for cybernetics did cause problems, leading to a
loss of scientific status in the 1960s (Elias, 1997). In a 1969 survey of neuro-
cybernetics, W. Grey Walter observed that a peculiar gap between theory and
practice is a feature of cybernetics, and may account for the disrepute which
has accumulated around the term (Walter, 1969: 94). Philosopher of science
Yehoshua Bar-Hillel explained in 1964 that the popularity of cybernetics
declined rather quickly in the States, probably due to its having been usurped
there by overt or covert science-fiction (Bar-Hillel, 1964: 11), a tendency
Wiener had fought against (Wiener, 1956: 270). Maron noted that the vague-
ness of cybernetics caused a pseudoscientific fringe to make nonsensical
claims ... under the banner of cybernetics (Maron, 1968: 5). The sociological
study mentioned earlier observed that cybernetics seemed to attract a lunatic
fringe among scientists, particularly those with a penchant for the obscure and
a facility for creating neologisms (Apter, 1972: 111).
Donald MacKay, a leader of the British school of information theory, had
warned Heinz von Foerster of that outcome as early as 1959. Writing confiden-
tially and moved by our old friendship nurtured at a Macy conference,
MacKay was dismayed that von Foerster had lent his name to an English organ-
ization, ARTORG (Artificial Organism Research Group), which MacKay and
his colleagues in the field of information theory and automata in Britain Colin
Cherry, Denis Gabor, and A.M. Uttley considered to be a fringe group.
Its for just this kind of reason that folk such as Gabor, Uttley, Cherry & I are
chary of using the word Cybernetics nowadays, and I do hope that the work
of someone of your calibre wont lose some of the attention it deserves by this
newconnection. (I assume that you have seen the earlier Artorg sheets? Even
Warren [McCulloch] seemed a bit shocked by the one I showed him!).
34
Information theorists in the USA criticized the hubris often associated with the
interdisciplinarity of cybernetics and bionics. In a popular book on information
theory, John Pierce at Bell Labs noted that few scientists would acknowledge
themselves as cyberneticists, save perhaps in talking to those whomthey regard
as hopelessly uninformed (Pierce, 1961: 228).
35
In 1962 Edward David Jr, a
colleague of Pierces at Bell Labs, published a satire, inspired by Pierce, on the
tendency for physicists and engineers to rush into bionics projects with little or
no knowledge of biology or psychology (David, 1962).
At the same time that cybernetics was losing scientific status in the USA
and Britain, it became the scientific ideology of the Soviet Union (Elias, 1997;
Gerovitch, 2002) and reached cult status in one area of American popular cul-
ture. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Stewart Brands Whole Earth Catalog
helped create a cybernetic counterculture by appropriating the interdiscipli-
nary practices in research and development labs, embracing the technological
utopianism of Buckminster Fuller, and promoting Batesons interpretation of
cybernetics as a radical epistemology of systems thinking, rather than the sci-
ence of dehumanizing automation and cold-war militarism (Turner, 2006:
chap. 2). While the strategy of legitimacy exchange had lost its value for cyber-
neticians in scientific circles by the 1960s, it was exploited by the countercul-
ture which may have hastened its decline among elite scientists.
In all of these ways, asking where the cyborgs are in cybernetics helps us
think about early cybernetics in a contextualized, multi-faceted manner, and
helps us imagine a history that disengages cyborg studies from cybernetics,
one that recognizes multiple interpretations of a discipline that claimed to be
universal. In the 1950s and 1960s, cyberneticians and their critics in the USA
and Britain contested the meaning of cybernetics, viewed the protean field as
separate areas of research, and witnessed a decline in its scientific status.
These contestations provide ample material to reinterpret the science, tech-
nology, and imagination of cybernetics the work of scientists, engineers,
journalists, and novelists who created a web of relations among humans,
machines, and the new concept of information in the Cold War.
Notes
The research for this paper was funded by the US National Science Foundation, grant number
SES80689, and by the Bovay Program in History and Ethics of Engineering at Cornell
University. I would like to thank Christina Dunbar-Hester and Daniel Kreiss for their research
assistance; Glenn Bugos and Rachel Prentice for help with the NASA archives; Nora Murphy
and Jeff Mifflin for help at the MIT Archives, and Peter Dear, Bernard Geoghegan, Katie King,
Kreiss, Kevin Lambert, Fred Turner, Phoebe Sengers, Suman Seth, Ana Viseu, and the
anonymous referees for Social Studies of Science for their comments on earlier drafts.
1. See also Clynes & Kline (1960: 27).
2. A similar point has been made by Gray (1999).
3. In Modest Witness (Haraway, 1997), the term cyborg refers to such protean
technoscientific objects as the microchip, seed, gene, and OncoMouse. In a later
interview, Haraway placed the genetically engineered mouse alongside the primate and the
cyborg as three literal hybrids that are also simultaneously figurations involved in a kind of
narrative interpellation of ways of living in the world .... So you have animal-human for
primate; machine-animal for cyborg; and nature and labor for OncoMouse (Haraway,
2000: 140). Earlier, Haraway (1995) analyzed the Terminator, a robot covered with a
human skin, as a cyborg figure.
4. Other uses of the cyborg concept in STS include interventionist cyborg anthropology
in emerging science and technology (Downey et al., 1995; Downey & Dumit, 1997;
Dumit & Davis-Floyd, 1998); critiques of the proliferation of cyborgs (Gray, 1997);
and the history of operations research, game theory, and a transformed management
science and economics as cyborg sciences in Cold War America (Pickering, 1995;
Sent, 2000; Mirowski 2002). For criticisms of cyborg studies, see Galison (1994),
Hacking (1998), and Wajcman (2004: chap. 4).
5. Exceptions to this approach are Hayles (1999), who identifies three periods of cybernetics,
Pickering (2002), who notes substantial differences in British cybernetics, and Gerovitch
(2002), who describes contested meanings of the universal language of cybernetics.
6. Bowker, Edwards, and Kay also conflate cybernetics with information theory, ignoring
the intense boundary work performed by American information theorists to exclude
cybernetics from their emerging field. See Kline (2004).
7. See Heims (1991), Richardson (1991: chap. 4), Bowker (1993), Galison (1994), Edwards
(1996: chap. 6), Kay (2000), Gerovitch (2002), Mindell (2002: chap. 11), Pickering (2002),
Light (2003), Mindell et al. (2003), Bowker (2005: chap. 2), and Dunbar-Hester (2009).
8. On the post-war debate on automation, see Bix (2000: chap. 8).
9. The IEEE Professional Group on Systems Science and Cybernetics merged with the
IEEE Professional Group on Man-Machine Systems to form the present-day IEEE
Society on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics in 1971. See Ferrell (1971).
10. For a photograph of Wiener using the device, see Mann (1997: 434).
11. Salt Lake City Tribune, clipping, n.d., ca. January 1950, box 7-110. See also Boston
Globe, 29 December 1949, clipping in box 25c-378. Both in Norbert Wiener Papers,
Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, MA, USA.
12. See, for example, Norbert Wiener to B.M. Frost, 2 March 1949, box 6-93; J.B. Wiesner
to K.L. Raheja, 16 September 1949, box 7-104; Wiener to Peter L. McLaughlin,
5 January 1950, box 7-109. On Helen Kellers interest and visit, see Thornton Fry to
Wiener, 30 December 1949, box 7-108; and Wiener to Keller, 11 February 1950; and
Keller to Wiener, 12 February 1950 (quotation), box 7-111. All in Wiener Papers.
13. Norbert Wiener to President Killian, 2 December 1951, box 10-144; Wiener to J.B.
Wiesner, 17 November 1952, box 11-159, and Wiesner to Wiener, 1 December 1952,
box 11-160. All in Wiener Papers.
14. Wiener repeated the passage on the hearing device that first appeared in Wiener (1950b:
196203; 1954: 16773), and briefly mentioned it as an incomplete project in Wiener
(1956: 287).
15. See Marshall McLuhan to Norbert Wiener, 28 March 1951, Wiener Papers, box 9-135;
and McLuhan (1951: 31, 34, 92).
16. Norbert Wiener to Scott Allan, 17 July 1963, Wiener Papers, box 23-328.
17. John E. Mangelsdorf to Norbert Wiener, 16 April 1953, box 23-325; Wiener to
Mangelsdorf, 22 April 1963, box 23-325; and Manfred Clynes to Wiener, 13 November
1961, box 21-305. All in Wiener Papers.
18. For his definition of the term, see Clynes (1961: 946). For a later usage, see Wiener &
Schad (1964).
19. Arthur W. Martin to Warren McCulloch, 1 June 1959; draft of letter from McCulloch
to Martin, n.d. [ca. June 1959]; Manfred Clynes to McCulloch, 4 January 1960;
Curriculum Vitae [of Clynes], n.d., ca. January 1960; and McCulloch,
recommendation for Clynes, n.d., ca. March 1960, all in Warren McCulloch Papers,
American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA, Manfred Clynes Correspondence.
20. Warren McCulloch to Hudson Hoaglund, 13 January 1969, McCulloch Papers, Nathan
Kline Correspondence.
21. G. Dale Smith to Richard J. Preston, 12 April 1962; and Smith and Alfred M. Mayo,
NASA Procurement Request, 24 April 1962, attached to Arthur B. Freeman to Mayo,
25 April 1962. All documents in Records of NASA Ames Research Center, Record
Group 255.4.1, Moffet Field, CA, Series 19, Central Files, 19591967, box RMO-3.
22. Eugene Konecci, Advanced Concepts in Man-Machine Control: A Review, speech,
712 September 1964, McCulloch Papers, folder NASA Committee on Biotechnology
and Human Research, November 1964, # 1, pp. 4245.
23. On this score, Gray et al. (1995: 8) say that after this study the agency [NASA]
seemed almost allergic to the term cyborg and instead used more technical, and
usually specific, locutions like teleoperators, human augmentation, biotelemetry, and
bionics.
24. R.T. Allen to Frank Voris, 27 August 1963, Ames Research Center Records, Series 19,
Central Files, 19591967, box RMO-5.
25. Frank B. Voris to James D. Hardy, 9 September 1963, Ames Research Center Records,
Series 19, Central Files, 19591967, box RMO-5.
26. G.M. McDonnel to Warren McCulloch, 14 December 1964, McCulloch Papers, folder
NASA Committee on Biotechnology and Human Research, March 1965, # 3.
27. Eugene Konecci to Warren McCulloch, 29 April 1966, NASA folder, McCulloch
Papers.
28. On receiving the initial ONR grant, see Marshall Yovits to Heinz von Foerster, 30
December 1957, Heinz von Foerster Papers, University Archives, University of Illinois,
Urbana, IL, box 7-McCulloch.
29. Warren McCulloch to Heinz von Foerster, 7 November 1957, box 7-McCulloch; and
von Foerster to Jerome Lettvin, 20 March 1958, box 7-Lettvin, both in von Foerster
Papers.
30. On reliability problems due to complex aircraft systems, see Downer (2006).
31. See Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, s.v., bionic.
32. Walter Pitts to Warren McCulloch, 21 April 1969, McCulloch Papers, Walter Pitts
Correspondence.
33. See, for example, Norbert Wiener to Waldo Frank, 21 November 1950, Wiener Papers,
box 9-130.
34. Donald MacKay to Heinz von Foerster, 25 May 1959, Von Foerster Papers, box 7,
MacKay folder. On ARTORG, see Cordeschi & Numerico (2003).
35. On Pierces satirical remarks on cybernetics and criticisms of Wiener, see Kline (2004).
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Ronald R. Kline is Bovay Professor in the History and Ethics of Engineering
at Cornell University, where he holds a joint appointment between the
Science and Technology Studies Department and the School of Electrical
Engineering. He is completing a book on the history of cybernetics,
information theory, and the social sciences in the USA during the Cold War.
Address: Science and Technology Studies, 334 Rockefeller Hall, Cornell
University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA; email: rrk1@cornell.edu

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